"What I had seen, of course, was the Bokononist ritual of boko-maru, or the mingling of awareness....[I]t is impossible to be sole-to-sole with another person without loving the person..."—Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut

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Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Gwen Stacy + Kurt Vonnegut

Since I live in the time-delay world of paying huge amounts of $$$ for cable, and thus never go to the movies anymore (sigh) and never use Netflix or rent DVDs (because of stated indebtedness to the cable bill), I just watched The Amazing Spider-Man (2012).A few days later I had to watch it again—it is quite good except for the manipulation of the details of the origin story that does mostly keep the essence of the myth intact—mainly because I spotted something interesting while Gwen Stacy sat outside at lunch in an early scene of the film.And, yes, she is holding a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle:

A damned fine if-not-wonderful novel that has a bit of a web motif:

But also it is a cautionary tale about science. Dr. FelixHoenikkerenters the novel as a father of the atomic bomb, inventor ofice-nine, and personification of the division between science and morality:

After the thing [atomic bomb] went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, "Science has now known sin." And do you know what Father said? He said, "What is sin?"(Cat’s Cradle 17)

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About Me

“One of the violences perpetuated by illiteracy is the suffocation of the consciousness and the expressiveness of men and women who are forbidden from reading and writing, thus limiting their capacity to write about their reading of the world so they can rethink about their original reading of it.” Paulo Freire, Teachers as Cultural Workers